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Nearly optimal multi attribute auctions

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

In almost every procurement situation, non-price attributes of the items to be purchased play a crucial role. Procurement protocols which take these attributes into account are called multi-attribute auctions. We study the following problem called optimal multi-attribute auction design: A buyer wants to procure an item which can be supplied in many possible configurations. The buyer has a value v(x) for each possible configuration x. Every seller i has a privately known cost ci.(x) of supplying each possible configuration. Given a probability distribution on the cost functions, our goal is to design an auction which maximizes the expected utility of the buyer. This paper offers a generic method for the construction of nearly optimal multi-attribute auctions. The computational time of our mechanisms equals the time required for computing (or approximating) the optimal mechanism on a small number of agents. Our method can be successfully applied to many variants of multiattribute auction design.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEC'05
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages279-285
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)1595930493
DOIs
StatePublished - 5 Jun 2005
Event6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC 2005 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 5 Jun 20058 Jun 2005

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

Conference

Conference6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC 2005
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period5/06/058/06/05

Keywords

  • Multi attribute auctions
  • Optimal auctions
  • Polynomial time

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